Image Processing Services

Image processing transforms images changing their appearance, quality, or format without necessarily understanding their content. Examples: resizing, cropping, noise reduction, colour correction, format conversion, background removal. Computer vision understands image content answering questions about what is depicted. Examples: "is this image a cat or a dog?", "where are the defects on this PCB?", "how many people are in this crowd?". In practice, image processing is often a preprocessing step for computer vision: raw images are cleaned, normalised, and standardised by an image processing pipeline before being fed to a computer vision model. A document image processing pipeline might deskew and denoise a scanned page (image processing) before passing it to an OCR engine (computer vision) that extracts the text.

Tesseract 5 is the best open-source OCR engine free, self-hosted (data stays on your infrastructure), good accuracy on clean printed text, and supports 100+ languages. It is the right choice when: data privacy prevents using cloud APIs, the volume is very high (cloud API costs would be prohibitive), and the document quality is good (clean, well-scanned). AWS Textract is the best managed cloud OCR for structured documents it preserves table structure, identifies form fields (label + value pairs), and handles multi-column layouts with significantly better accuracy than Tesseract on complex layouts. Use when: you are already on AWS, table and form extraction matters, and a per-page cost ($0.0015-$0.015/page) is acceptable. Google Document AI has pre-built models specifically for invoices, receipts, ID documents, and custom forms use when you have a specific document type that matches a Google pre-built model.